The wireless telecommunication industry has gone through various stages of development over the last twenty (20) to thirty (30) years. First, in the first generation of wireless networks, wireless communications were handled via analog-type of wireless transmissions using protocols such as AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) and ANSI-41 (American National Standards Institute-41). In the second generation of wireless networks, the user's voice signal was sampled and carried using digital data signals over the air interface, therefore providing for more reliable and accurate communications while increasing the networks' capacity. In the third and fourth generations of wireless communications, data is added to the digital voice communications and allows the wireless network users to communicate not only voice signals but also to have data access to the Internet and to a wide variety of services associated therewith.
As of today, there are already more wireless subscribers than fixed line subscribers. The growth in wireless communications subscribers has ensured a steady and healthy growth of the wireless industry as the number of worldwide wireless subscribers progressed in just over twenty (20) years from zero (0) to five (5) billions, while the penetration rate of wireless subscriptions is close to one hundred pour cent (100%) in many countries around the globe.
The next wave of growth for wireless telecommunications over the next 10 years will most probably not come from adding regular users to the network, as it has been the case in the past. Rather, after having connected places via the fixed lines, and people via the wireless (mobile) communications, the telecommunications industry is now looking into connecting “things”, i.e. for example home appliances, cars, meters, sensors, etc to the Internet, in order to provide an entire new range of services that are appealing to the public and that can sustain the growth of the mobile industry. Therefore, it is the so-called machine-to-machine (M2M) type of communications that will ensure the growth both in the data traffic and in the revenues for the operators of wireless networks, while providing services as never seen before for the users. Houses and home appliances, sensors, and other devices will therefore be wirelessly connected, accessible, and controlled via local networks or the Internet. More particularly, M2M communications also means that an application on a given device can communicate with another application on another device, or on a server, without necessarily involving a human being. It is expected that in ten (10) to twenty (20) years from now, the M2M types of communication will generate a number of connected devices (connected meaning connected to a wireless network and/or the Internet) that is tenfold the number of connected users. For example, a company like TELEFONAKTIEBOLAGET L M ERICSSON (PUBL) forecasts that by year 2020 there will be fifty (50) billions of connected devices worldwide, and that it is the pool of connected devices that will be mostly responsible for the increase in the data traffic over the wireless networks. Examples of connected devices include a pool of electrical counters of a local electrical company that can include millions of electrical counters connected over a wireless interface (such as for example a short range wireless interface) to the local electricity company gateway, which gathers data from all the counters and relays it for example via a 3G wireless connection to the financial database of the electrical company, or a group of connected devices including a series of meteorological sensors or probes that register the wind and the temperature in various locations within a province or a country, and relay the data gathered to the gateway responsible for assembling all this metrological data before providing it to a processing center of the local meteorological company.
It is easily anticipated that many of the networks of connected devices, also referred herein simply as devices, will be significant in size, and will possibly include millions of devices (e.g. a network of electrical counters for the households of the State of California). Therefore, groups of devices will need to be constituted in order to render the communications more efficient. This, in turn, will engender new issues associated with the management of such large groups of devices. Moreover, in some instances the groups of devices and applications running thereon may be visible to the outside Internet world, e.g. when these applications register directly with an M2M application server and can be directly contacted by external parties, while in other instances, those groups of devices and their associated applications will not be visible (non-visible devices) to the outside world (“outside” referring to outside the local network of devices connected to a gateway) when for example such devices and their related applications register with and connect via their corresponding gateway(s), and cannot be contacted directly, but rather only via the gateway. Finally, yet another issue associated with the management of large groups of devices is how an external party (such as for example a subscriber, a network administrator, or another device of a different network) can access and communicate with devices that are member of a certain group. In such a circumstance, it would be useful for the external party to easily contact groups of devices and applications, in order to be able to communicate with all those devices at the same time instead of, for example, having to communicate the same information (e.g. an application update, a configuration, or any other type of message or information that may be common to a multitude of applications running on the M2M devices) to each device individually, which can be cumbersome in terms of data traffic and signalling. However, with the current implementations, where groups are dynamically created, modified, and deleted in various gateways of a wireless network in an ad-hoc fashion it is not possible to know what groups a device is member of since, first, not all the groups are visible to the outside Internet world and second, because there is no standardized way to obtain such information.
Reference is now made to FIG. 1 (Prior Art), which shows a high level network diagram of a current network implementation of an M2M setup. Shown in FIG. 1, are devices 102 and 104 connected via gateways 106 and 108 to an M2M application server (M2M-AS) 110, which is part of a telecommunications network 100 (e.g. a wireless telecommunications network). The devices (interchangeably called “M2M devices” or simply “devices” hereinafter) 102 are typically called non-visible (or private) devices since they are connected via gateways 106 and 108 to the M2M-AS, while devices 104 are typically called visible devices since they are connected directly to the M2M-AS, i.e. without passing through a gateway. The role of the M2M application server 110 is to centralize knowledge about the devices 102 and 104, and to manage resources on behalf of those devices for the purpose of communication between the devices' applications and other parties.
For this purpose, both visible devices and gateways can register with the M2M AS. Applications resident on visible devices 104 register with the device 104 on which they are resident, and the application registration can be further announced to the M2M AS 110. The same applies to applications that are resident on gateways 106 and 108, i.e. they can register with the gateway and be announced further to the M2M-AS.
On the other hand, applications resident on non-visible devices 102 connected to the gateways 106 or 108 register with the gateways and the application registration can be further announced to the M2M AS 110.
The M2M-AS 110 is further connected via core network connections 113 to a core network A 116 and a core network B 118 of the communications network 100, which may both be based on a 3GPP/EPC (3rd Generation Partnership Project/Evolved Packet Core) architecture. A home subscriber server (HSS) 114 may be present in the core network B 118 for providing access to a subscriber database which allows authorizing access to M2M services in case the access network credentials are reused for M2M access as well. The M2M-AS 110 also connects to an XDMS server 120 for the purpose of storing and managing M2M resources. The internal functional blocks of the M2M-AS 110 are also shown within the M2M-AS 110 and include various functionalities as defined by ETSI TS 102 690 which is herein included by reference in its entirety.
With reference to the exemplary scenario shown in FIG. 1, the applications running on the non-visible devices 102 are registered with their respective gateways 106 or 108 and can chose to announce their registration to the M2M AS 110 via their respective gateways when their gateway registers with the M2M AS. On the other side, the applications running on the visible devices 104 register locally with their respective device 104, and can chose to announce their registration to the M2M AS 110 when the device registers with the M2M AS 110. These later applications are fully visible and can be contacted directly by external parties by contacting the device.
Conclusively, there are both great numbers and various types of M2M application and devices in many networks, and therefore contacting each device at a time can be proven inefficient, while contacting groups of devices requires prior knowledge of each group membership and identification in an environment where such information cannot be easily obtained or managed, or is simply inexistent.
Accordingly, it should be readily appreciated that in order to overcome the deficiencies and shortcomings of the existing solutions, it would be advantageous to have a method and system for efficiently enabling communications with groups of devices.